


Unfinished Business

by lalaietha



Series: Ten Thousand Things [7]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-25
Updated: 2012-04-24
Packaged: 2017-11-04 07:04:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/391105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/lalaietha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And then there was Ursa's daughter, and her so-called husband.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Daughter

A messenger-hawk had arrived, both with the news of Lady Ursa's return in general, and then another later. When she arrived on the island, she was expected. 

It was not a particularly large lake, and the island was big enough for a single house, gardens attached, and the dock in a sheltered, tiny inlet for the boat that took one from the island to the shore and back again. 

Mei Wan met the lady at the dock. She was alone except for Piu who rowed the boat, but if Mei Wan shaded her eyes she could see to the lakeshore and see the four soldiers Lady Ursa had left there. 

Mei Wan bowed, when the Fire Lord's mother stepped onto the dock. "We are honoured by your visit, Lady Ursa," she said. 

"Thank you," the lady replied. And her voice was level and cool when she said, "I want to see my daughter." 

_No you don't_ , was what Mei Wan thought. But she kept that locked away, bowed again, and said, "This way, if you please."

*****

They'd known she was coming, so they had administered the sleeping drink early. Azula was having a worse day than others, and better that her mother see her peacefully sleeping than cursing them all, crying, and maybe even trying to hurt herself or anyone who came near.

It was a warm day, so they'd laid her on the bed without covers. There was nothing to do about the scratches she'd left on her hands and arms, taking the wrapped cloth off her fingertips before they could stop her and replace them. They had had to restrain her just loosely, so that they would have some warning if she woke suddenly and in a worse state than she had gone to sleep. 

Mei Wan led Lady Ursa to the room where Azula slept. "She is completely unbalanced," she explained, as they walked. "We have tried a number of treatments with some success, but never long-lasting. It is as if her body and mind are at war with one another, and her mind is at war with itself." And sometimes I don't think, Mei Wan thought but did not say, that she _wants_ to recover. 

"I was told she can no longer bend?" Lady Ursa said, her voice still cool and calm, only the faintest note of a question. Mei Wan nodded. 

"It was necessary to ask the Avatar to take her firebending away," she said, making sure all the regret was there in her voice. "Otherwise, no one could get close enough to help her, or take care of her, and it would have been necessary to keep her hands chained at all times." 

Mei Wan opened the door, and stepped back so Lady Ursa could enter. The room was light, the windows open to catch the breeze, everything clean and lovely - Mei Wan made sure of that. But Lady Ursa's eyes were only for the patient, as a mother's must be, and Mei Wan saw her take a deep, slow breath and let it out. 

"She's restrained now," Lady Ursa pointed out in a voice that seemed carefully neutral. Mei Wan winced. 

"Yes," she said. "Sometimes she wakes violently, and sometimes tries to hurt herself." 

Lady Ursa kept moving. She walked to one of the stools by the table and, matter of fact, picked it up - though Mei Wan knew it wasn't light - and set it beside the bed before she sat on it. "The sleep isn't natural?" she asked, and then looked up when Mei Wan didn't immediately answer. "You drugged her," she clarified. Her voice was still very cool and very calm. 

"Yes, Lady Ursa," Mei Wan said. She might have lied, but the woman's gaze made that difficult and it was almost a relief when she looked away. When Lady Ursa reached out one hand to brush back some of Azula's hair, Mei Wan felt she had to say, "I should tell you, Lady Ursa, that you are one of her most frequent hallucinations." 

Lady Ursa's hand stopped. It stayed hovering in the air and she turned her face to Mei Wan again with an expression that told Mei Wan to go on, as if Mei Wan were simply telling her about a kind of flower or tree. 

"The things she says are - " Mei Wan hesitated. "Not pleasant." 

To her shock, Lady Ursa smiled. Granted, it was a very sad smile, as she turned back to her daughter, and let her hand continue its motion. "No," she said, and her voice was sad as well. "I would be very surprised if they were." 

When her hand touched the princess' cheek, Azula did not wake. But her head turned a little into the touch, and Lady Ursa's fingers moved through her daughter's hair (longer now, a little: they had had to cut it all off, when she first arrived) in an accustomed way. "She always had such beautiful hair," the lady murmured. 

Mei Wan didn't say anything. It didn't feel like her place. And when she saw the glint of a tear on Lady Ursa's cheek, catching the sun, she looked away. 

Lady Ursa wiped it away with the back of her hand, giving it no notice. "You don't know what's wrong with her," she said, and it wasn't a question. Mei Wan grimaced. She hated to admit failure. 

"We know what brought on the first fit, Lady Ursa," she said. "The sequence of events, at least. And we know that it perpetuates because we cannot bring her into balance - not her thoughts, not her chi, not anything. But . . . " she trailed off, opening her hands to admit that there was nothing more. 

Lady Ursa simply nodded. In that same polite tone, she asked, "Is there any technique you know of that you have not tried?" And the question was polite, but it made Mei Wan look down. There was something about how she asked it. 

"No, Lady Ursa," she said. 

Lady Ursa simply nodded again. She bent her head, kissed her daughter's temple, and then stood up. 

"There will be someone come to collect her within fourteen days," she said, and the manner in which she said it left no room for argument. "It won't be me, as I have to prepare a place for her. Don't drug her again unless it's absolutely necessary." Her eyes caught Mei Wan's, and she said, "Not convenient, madame. Necessary." 

Mei Wan felt herself colour. But she rallied. "Lady Ursa," she protested, "with all respect, I am not sure you understand - " 

"She is my daughter," Lady Ursa said, with deadly finality, as Mei Wan's words stumbled to a halt. "Unless you lied a moment ago, you have exhausted your options for her care. I appreciate all that you have done for her, but there are avenues open to me that aren't open to you. But above all, she is my daughter. _I_ will be responsible for her. This is not a matter I will discuss. Those I send to collect her will come under the royal seal." 

Mei Wan swallowed. "Yes, Lady Ursa," she said. 

Lady Ursa's demeanour softened with that, just a little; her voice was kinder when she said, "Have someone write down everything that you have learned and observed as yet. It would be best if we did not have to repeat the same work, when I'm sure you have done it thoroughly and admirably so far."

"Should I tell her you came?" Mei Wan asked, and tried to keep her tone respectful. 

Lady Ursa looked at her daughter, and her face was troubled and unhappy. But her voice was clear and even when she answered. 

"Use your discretion," she said, and nodded to Mei Wan to precede her out.


	2. Husband

It took very little time to arrange things. 

Ursa didn't bother her son with much in the way of details. She told him the outline, made it clear he could know more if he asked (naturally), but otherwise, she didn't task him. His feelings about his sister were deeply ambivalent, and for that she could hardly blame him. 

And Mai such ferocious indifference on any thought of Azula that hatred might have been kinder, and less consuming. 

Ursa couldn't blame them. She didn't. To them, Azula had genuinely been a monster; it would take a saint not to feel the way they did, about the sister who would have seen you drown in a boiling lake, the friend who terrorized and imprisoned you, the sister who laughed while you slowly died, saving someone else's life from her. 

Ursa understood that. It was, to be honest, a marvel that Azula was still alive. 

But Azula was her daughter, first and above all. She had carried her, birthed her, nursed her, watched her grow. Ursa could no more let her go than she could breathe water. This was true, and more than true, and in absence of everything else would still have driven her. 

Beneath it, though, far less important but there still, like a baby's beating heart, was her own vengeance. 

She arranged everything first. The house, the attendants. Two letters it took a very long time to write, given their brevity, because of how important each chosen word had to be. One to the South Pole, one to the North Pole. 

Healing was a waterbender's gift. 

Finally, she selected the attendants and guards who would bring Azula to the house in the first place. 

When it was all done, when the last seal set to paper, the last messenger-hawk sent and returned with confirmation that what she wished would come to be, Ursa put on a cloak, drew up its hood, and went up to a volcano, and a prison. 

One of her own guards followed her, a woman named Ming that Iroh had recommended, when Ursa saw him in Ba Sing Se. Ursa liked her; a firebender, others underestimated her because she kept her own counsel and wasn't prone to exerting her power when she didn't need to. That suited Ursa very well. 

The guards at the prison couldn't see her face, but Ming was a fairly clear declaration. They bowed and opened doors for her, and one of them led her down to a particular cell, in a particular hallway. 

"Wait here," she said to Ming and to the guard who opened this door for her; then she stepped inside. 

"Ah," said a voice from inside the cage, from the figure huddled in the corner of it and seemed to stare at the floor rather than the light from the corridor, "another interview." The voice was bitter, resentful, and acid. "No progress on your fruitless search?" 

The idea of being mistaken for their son made Ursa smile. She reached up to push back her hood and said, "Oh, he found me." 

She watched Ozai's head jerk up, watched him squint into the dim light from the door. For a moment they looked at each other, each for the same reason. And Ursa's smile didn't fade. 

He had stood straight and tall, her husband had, on the day that he banished her, taking all the benefit of her treason and murder and washing his hands of it. She suspected he had been equally straight-spined, haughty and self-satisfied when he sent word that she was to be killed. He had been handsome and cruel, the nation's greatest firebender, the prince and then the Fire Lord, in the fullness of his power. And that was how she had remembered him, year after year. 

Now he was a wreck of a man, limbs thinning from prison-food, muscles softening from lack of use, hair lank and dirty, unshaven, bowed. Stripped of his power, stripped of his royalty, thrown in a stone cell to rot by the very son he would have killed, whom he had maimed and offered up as a sacrifice to his power. 

"It's so nice to see you, husband," she said sweetly, still smiling, the curve of her lips small but like an incandescence in her own heart. 

Ozai's lip curled. "Here to gloat?" he said, trying to summon up his accustomed sneer. It didn't work very well, coming from a man in a cage. 

"Yes," Ursa said, quietly. "Yes, that's exactly half of what I'm here to do, Ozai. I paid the price for your coronation with an old man's blood on my hands, you exiled me, and then you tormented and exiled the son I had committed murder to save. You turned our people into monsters, and made _my daughter_ the first among them, until she shattered her own mind." 

Her smile widened, just a little. "And now my son sits on the throne, and you rot in here, put here by a twelve year old boy who refused to kill you after he tossed you around and away like so much trash. Oh yes, Ozai, I'm here to gloat. To that, I have the right, and more than the right." 

If a human could have snarled, he would have been snarling. She went on, "And I am also here to tell you that it isn't finished, husband. I have all the rest of my life to help our son, my son, bring our people back from being little better than animals. To write our new history, where you will be remembered for exactly what you are. 

"And I have all the rest of my life to bring my daughter back to me, back to life. And believe me, at the end of it, she'll know what you are, too. And you won't have anything left at all." 

"I should have killed that _boy_ ," Ozai spat, "when my father asked it of me, and killed you for your treachery." 

"But you didn't," Ursa said. She raised her hands to her hood. "Good-bye, Ozai. Husband. This is the last time I'll ever see you, and I think the last time I will ever think of you." 

Then she lifted her hood, and turned her back on him, and the door; she heard it close behind her, heard the guard lock it, and she smiled at Ming. 

"Let's go back," she said. "I'm sure we could both use a good night's sleep."


End file.
